Kraken – Scam or not? They win the prize for the worst IT in crypto – that’s for sure

The Kraken exchange is operated by the San Francisco-based Payward Inc., the company is not under direct regulation by any agency. Founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell, this exchange has become one of the best and most secure Bitcoin exchanges. Kraken is trusted by hundreds of thousands of traders and has clients from North America, Europe and Japan. This exchange has support for an increasingly wide range of cryptocurrencies as well as fiat currencies. Kraken has a very popular platform that provides an exceptional Bitcoin exchange experience for the professional crypto traders and occasional users. This trading platform offers fast execution, innovative features, good support, and high security. Kraken supports margin trading and has very low fees compared to other more “beginner-friendly” exchanges. Customer funds reside in a bank account separate from Kraken’s operations account, and fees are transferred on a daily basis (customer funds cannot be borrowed). Fees depend on the tier in which your account belongs and are calculated as percentages of trade volumes, they range between 0% and 0.26%.

Website hacking has been on the rise lately, especially concerning cryptocurrency exchanges. The exchange hasn’t yet suffered a major hack. However, there are a few alleged reports by individuals, who claim their accounts were hacked. It is hard to verify their claims or if they aren’t to blame for mistakes like having a weak password or not enabling two-factor authentication. According to analysts, this exchange is also one of the safest that currently operate. Their security team is continually improving our end-to-end security measures, improving auditing processes, and reducing the ‘attack surface’ of their infrastructure. The company’s overall reputation is very good and Kraken stands as a reliable partner. They use a tiered system for account verification at Kraken which ranges from just facilitating digital asset deposit and trading on the lower end to processing fiat deposits and withdrawals on the higher end. Users can deposit and withdraw EUR, USD, CAD, GBP, Japanese Yen, bitcoins and other digital currencies. Kraken offers a free deposit for Euro, Canadian dollar, and Japanese yen. Fiat deposits and withdrawals are completed through SEPA, Swift, and bank wires (Fees vary from 0 – $10). Kraken makes no promises/guarantees/warranties on the outcome of potential or proposed forks, but the company will make its best effort to handle things in a way that benefits the most clients. On the official website, you can not find a live chat but you can send a message anytime via email. I have also found some reviews about Kraken’s unresponsive customer support. Kraken is active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Experiences with Kraken

The company’s overall reputation is very good and Kraken stands as a reliable partner. I did not find any incidents and complaints that make this exchange not reliable, the user reviews about Kraken are fairly mixed. Complaints vary from a slow processing of deposits, lack of response by the customer support to stop-loss orders not triggering. I also found some negative reviews on the forums but this is connected with the situation that Kraken has been unprepared for a surge of new users and surge in trading in last several months. The following quotes give you a sense of what other traders think about this cryptocurrency exchange:

  • I have been trying to get verified Tier 3 for 3 weeks now as my documentation was finally accepted a week ago, but still, I am not verified Tier 3 as that is the only way that one can deposit US Funds in order to purchase Ripple
  • Was offline the last 2 days due to IT issues – enough said.
  • Overall, I am very satisfied with them. Have twice transferred around 9000 USD. Each time took 2.5 days, very acceptable indeed
  • The customer services are unacceptable, huge delays, no help at all
  • Kraken is a little slow compared with Bitfinex
  • Kraken has a very good trading platform and the fees provided by Kraken are in line with offerings by other exchanges


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Kraken - Scam or not? They win the prize for the worst IT in crypto - that's for sure, 1.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating

5 opinions and experiences

  1. Lorand says:

    Hi all,

    I started in May to register to this kraken site but after I noticed that it is required phone number and ID so I changed my mind.

    I tried to close but I cannot, for closing account you need to set 2auth, which is require more data from you.

    I wrote them more than 20 support tickets I chat wit 5 person to close it till today Oct 3, but they are not closing, now even I cannot log in because two factor auth was not set, log in without two factor auth not working.

    This is the biggest scam exchange website, I am glad that I did not sent to them any crypto, please stay away.

    I need your tips your ideas what should/can do to remove some way my data.

  2. Binaro says:

    I had 1 btc stuck at Kraken I wanted to invest badly. It was impossible. Kraken was down and when it was up for a short period of time the server erros made it impossible to me to make a transfer. The coin I wanted to invest in (Stellar) went up about 200% during this time. Thanks Kraken!

  3. Coinler says:

    Kraken was the first exchange I was using.
    I still think they are secure, and both FIAT deposits and withdrawals work.
    But in the last couple of months the site was mostly offline, I always got Cloudflare 520 (and other numbers) warnings.
    Now they have updated their software, and there will be no trading fees until the end of January, but they have disabled witdhrawals completely!? So this is maybe not the best address to trade.

  4. KryptoKrypto says:

    Stay away, far away! I used them to buy my first bitcoin back in the days and they were pretty good. Now they are useless and next to criminal. It’s like a train that does not stop and lets you get out for 3 days. Imagine you have some bitcoin there and want to make use of them but it’s impossible to login or do anything for days. Incredible.

  5. Tugut says:

    What can you say? They are so incredibly incompetent with their IT that it hurts. I mean they are surely losing lots of millions. Other exchanges can get it done as well. Last time I tried it took me over an hour to send a few btc as I was constantly getting every kind of errors and was only refreshing all the time. Incredible. Someone should sue them.
    At least you can make fun of them lol:
    https://twitter.com/krakenfx/status/951212891792842752

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